Cheap shot reflects poorly on Gov. Christie

Feb. 5, 2014

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Would you want it thrown back at you decades later, with the implication that your behavior then defines you now?

It would be interesting to ask that question of David Wildstein now. The former Port Authority of New York and New Jersey executive at the center of the George Washington Bridge lane-closures scandal had his teenage dirty laundry aired for all to see by allies of the most powerful man in New Jersey over the weekend.

It may seem impossible to gather any sympathy at all for the man who helped orchestrate a traffic jam that inconvenienced thousands of commuters in Bergen County, but Gov. Chris Christie managed to do it with a memo sent to the governor’s political supporters and designed to paint Wildstein as the wild card.

“He was publicly accused by his high school social studies teacher of deceptive behavior,” the memo said of Wildstein.

The reaction from various corners was not complimentary. Dragging up high school was an untoward, ungracious and gratuitous shot, even though Wildstein kicked it off with an attorney’s letter that implied there was evidence somewhere out there that Christie knew about the lane closures as they happened, an assertion that Christie repeatedly has denied.

But what makes the memo all the more unsavory is the shared history of Wildstein and Christie. The two went to high school in Livingston together, although a year apart. Christie was a star baseball player and president of his class. Wildstein was the statistician for the baseball team.

Christie, during a Jan. 9 press conference, sought then to distance himself from Wildstein, saying they were never close friends and pointing out his own big-man-on-campus reputation versus Wildstein’s more nerdish pursuits.

Yeah, he went there, but it wasn’t as if he had to. Wildstein has enough baggage, all known to either Christie himself of his team, for a round-the-world trip. He’s one of those political operatives who floats around the edges (in this case, the Wally Edge, his pen name when he ran a political website) and gathers a reputation for hard-nosed behavior.

All of that behavior — Wally Edge, his stint as mayor of Livingston, the “culture of fear” he created at the authority — is fair game. But that also makes it fair game for Christie’s detractors. Did no one know about Wally Edge or any of Wildstein’s excesses when he received his political appointment to the authority?

Obviously, someone did. And someone remembered his run-in with a social studies teacher, too. Maybe that was all played for laughs back in the days before lane-closures, bad press and emails linking the whole affair to the governor’s office.

But it became less funny and a little sad when it was used in retaliation against a former ally run wild.